Color Trail at 44 Montgomery Street 2019

Designers: Edwin Schlossberg, Chris Neiderer, Kris Haberman, Lisa Barrette, Elinore Aladjem, Sarah Frankel, Caroline Bevan Rojek, Ed Purver , Yu-Ting Feng, Terrel Kirton, Charles Deluga, Stuart Fox, Laura Gunther, and Baldur Helgason, ESI Design, an NBBJ studio, New York, New York, USA
Client: River Communications for Beacon Capital Partners,
White Plains, New York, USA

In this San Francisco office tower, a new reactive light installation turns the lobby into a canvas, with passersby as the paintbrushes. Utilizing the length of the space, Color Trail at 44 Montgomery Street reacts to the movement of people, filling the space with watercolor-esque light.

As people walk through the lobby they become digital paintbrushes, trailing a colored path across the display. The media is driven by a suite of sensors that tracks people as they move through the lobby. Each person who enters the building generates a corresponding color moment in the media, which then moves with them across the space.

As more and more people fill the lobby, the media fills with brushstrokes, becoming more colorful and dynamic. When two people cross paths, the colors mix and swirl around each other, creating new colors and unexpected patterns. There are two different “brush” types: a soft-edged, fluid Organic Brush and a hard-edged, tightly bound, Geometric Brush.

The design of Color Trail centers around texture and light — located at one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco’s Financial District, this 43- story tower needed a lobby as bright and dynamic as the employees that pass through it.

The reactive media content plays on a custom, ribbed surface that echoes the fins on the tower’s facade, and emulates the movement of shadows and reflections cast by those fins through time-based programming.

Color Trail creates a bright, vibrant contrast to the largely monochrome space, transforming 44 Montgomery into a fitting home for start-ups and creatives.